Headed for a New Land

The shy girl thanked him bashfully and Romulus would tip his head down in a silent "you're welcome". She had caught her breath by now, and without panting like she'd run a marathon, Lillith appeared as normal as any other wolf. Maybe she had actually sprinted all the way from the castle up to the hilled gardens. A silly and questionable decision, but it explained away everything. While Lillith tucked away the valerian, the young Armada lad looked her over again, considering the strange smaller girl. She was sweet, shy and soft-spoken, but she was pretty, especially those rubies she called eyes. Maybe she was always this meek around new wolves, or was this her first time encountering a true stranger? If she was a pack wolf, there was a possibility that she'd never known anyone outside her covenant.

Lillith asked if he was a healer, prompting Roman's ears to perk atop his head. "I like to pretend I'm one," he joked with a roguish smile. "That's my way of saying I'm still learning, but I'm getting there. I'm guessing you are too?" He gestured with a paw to her makeshift satchel of herbs, cocking his head while fixing curious silver eyes on her. He supposed she could be an errand runner for one of her pack's healers, but she had rattled off the names of the herbs she needed with such confidence and certainty that she either had a great memory or she knew what she was talking about. "Calendula and Yarrow," he repeated while nodding his head. Both were common plants used in healing and easy enough to find. She was very much on a shopping trip to resupply her pack. "Those should be easy enough to find. C'mon, let's see what we can see." He cast a small smile to her and headed back down the hill toward the gardens proper where he'd passed all the flowers and bushes earlier.

As they walked down the hill into the gardens, Romulus led the charge through the natural flowerbeds that had formed around the old ruins. Finding the marigold had been easy, the bright goldenrod flowers standing out from the sea of green. Plus there were near the elderberry bush he'd snacked on earlier, so finding it was just a matter of retracing his steps. Roman led Lillith back the way he came to the marigold flowers, grinning triumphantly as the flowers came into sight again. "There we go, Calendula on demand," he chuckled and sat by the elderberry bush, popping a few into his mouth again while he let Lillith harvest as many of the petals as she needed.

Lillith asked if he was from around here and the boy gave an indirect answer. "Yes and no. My family was originally from these lands. They'd moved on some years ago, so I wasn't born here. I was born a long way away from here. I'm the first one to come back to my family's homelands since my grandfather was young." He didn't mind the questions; he enjoyed conversation enough, and it filled in the gaps of silence that would otherwise be between them. "What about you?" he asked while chewing on a few more berries, then holding his paw out to offer a couple to the fae. "Born and raised in the pack over there, or are you from somewhere else too?"

"Romulus Armada"